Are you still unclear about what programmatic curation is or how it’s impacting the industry?

If the answer is yes, don’t worry, you’re on the right track. That’s because what curation is and how it helps the industry depends on the different ways curators use their platforms. This key concept is what’s missing from the recent debate on how curation will impact the adtech ecosystem.

The trade press, for all their excellent coverage, is speaking about curation as if it’s just one thing. It’s not. It’s many things.

If you try to understand curation by conflating its many applications, it’s easy to conclude that it will favor the largest pubs, hurt the long tail, needlessly challenge the role of DSPs, and add a meaningless layer of tech tax.

However, if we zero in on specific uses, you’ll see how curation can benefit all businesses across the supply chain, increase monetization for both large and long-tail publishers, foster innovation, and dramatically improve the environmental sustainability of programmatic advertising.

The Programmatic Curation Chameleon: How Platforms Adapt For Users

Let’s take a detailed look at just some of the ways a business can use a curation platform and discuss how those uses impact the adtech ecosystem. While the list below is extensive, it only covers some – not all – curation use cases.

Large Agencies: Manage Strategic Publishers

Curation use: Managing a short roster of large strategic publishers the agency has agreements with

Objectives:

  • Facilitate meeting spending commitments with publishers
  • Ensure bid opportunities and higher win rates

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Moves large publishers closer to agencies
  • Offers more levers and innovative solutions for deal negotiation, helping both agencies and publishers

Agencies: Curate The Open Web

Curation use: Applying expertise selecting publishers, targeting, vendors, and optimizing the supply path

Objectives:

  • Curate site lists relevant to advertiser campaigns
  • Apply targeting at the SSP level for better SPO, higher match rates, and more bid opportunities and reach
  • Bring innovative, new-to-market solutions to clients

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Vertical site lists help publishers, especially the long tail, in specific categories, such as travel, family, food & beverage, etc.
  • Allows utilization of new providers without depending on DSP integrations or having to change DSPs

Curators With Data, Contextual, Ad Formats, or Other Technology

Curation use: Layer their segments or technology across open web supply

Objectives:

  • Target their tech across the largest possible supply footprint to ensure scale

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Adds an additional layer of value to supply, giving marketers more powerful tools and capabilities
  • Benefits the open web, particularly the long tail, by ensuring DSPs can see their inventory when it is relevant to buyers
  • Saves DSP server and infrastructure costs
  • Allows publishers to monetize their first-party data assets across the open web by offering audiences to more buyers via curation platforms

This category is quite high level and could be subdivided several times. Examples of curators in this group include:

Alternative ID Providers

Curation use: Audience segments consisting of the alternative IDs hosted in an SSP’s database.

Objectives:

  • Reach the 35 – 50% of consumers in cookieless browsers
  • Solve match rate data loss from cookie syncing in Chrome

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Allows publishers to monetize users in Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc.
  • Allows buyers to reach the consumers they’ve been missing in cookieless providers
  • Allows buyers to use alternative IDs without depending on DSP integrations with an ID provider
  • Drives more cookieless spend to DSPs

Brands With In-House Programmatic Teams

Curation use: Curate sites, data, and targeting for easy workflow and better performance. Use third-party technologies not available in their DSP.

Objectives:

  • Target their customer database or acquire new customers

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Encourages innovation as brands can adopt new technologies without depending on DSP integrations

Publisher First-Party Data

Curation use: Let marketers leverage high-quality publisher first-party data to reach audiences across the open web.

Objectives:

  • Provide marketers unique publisher verified data sets

Benefits to the ecosystem:

  • Offers publishers powerful ways to monetize their first-party data asset
  • Allows publishers to expand and innovate upon the existing media offer

Example: Publishers Clearing House

Curation is a Platform, You Can Perform On Stage However You Want

Nothing limits the creativity of the businesses that use curation platforms. As it was built for innovation, they’re free to create new intellectual property and add value to supply in line with their own vision.

In 2025, we predict that brands will increasingly use curation platforms to target their own first-party customer data. Curation platforms offer match rate advantages, with one less data hop across the supply chain. Brands also have more control over their first-party data asset, with less risk of leakage.

In the year ahead, we also expect to see new applications and technologies developed to work with curation platforms that we haven’t even imagined yet!

Curation: Shaping A Better Adtech Future

Hopefully, by narrowing in on some of these use cases, you can see the various ways that programmatic curation platforms help businesses across the open internet, particularly publishers and DSPs.

To really understand the benefits, we have to understand why these uses are emerging. It largely comes down to one thing: efficiency. Curation effectively solves for our ecosystem’s sheer quantity of supply and the inefficiency of how it’s passed on to buyers. Ultimately, curation makes sure that marketers can see the inventory they want to buy and reduces layers of costly data processing.

To be clear, curation platforms on their own don’t make programmatic more efficient. It’s those named above who apply their own tech or expertise who do.

And, it isn’t just the adtech ecosystem that wins, our planet does too. According to Scope3, programmatic advertising generates 215,000 metrics tons of carbon each month. By more effectively matching supply to demand, curation can reduce the amount of data processing across the supply chain, helping to mitigate the environmental impact of advertising.

Curation ultimately shapes both a smarter and greener adtech future. By streamlining the programmatic supply path, reducing costs, and fostering innovation, publishers benefit from improved monetization, buyers benefit from greater efficiency, and we all benefit from lower carbon emissions.

Want to learn more about curation?

Let's talk!